Learning Flex
Like many people in the community I have been following the development of Zorn and was excited about the pricing level and the release of an Alpha version to play around with.
I need to create a tool to edit an XML file and save it back again. Luckily I don't have a hard deadline to complete the tool within, so it’s an ideal project to begin learning Flex with. I find it easier to learn something new with a specific goal in mind.
So between my other work (mostly Flash and Director) I've decided to start tackling Flex. It was easy enough to go through the quick start tutorials and the sample browser (great tool). Amazing how much functionality you get with so little code.
However, once I exhausted these resources and tried to do something that wasn't a derivative implementation of the samples I quickly began to hit walls. I haven't used earlier versions of Flex and it is lot to wrap your head around. Because it’s an alpha most of the documentation and tutorials are still being developed and some of the source code in the help documents won't even compile... perfectly understandable, but still frustrating. The language reference is extremely useful and does a good job of listings the "massive" amounts of properties and methods available, but doesn't explain when and how to use them.
So, I’ll post little things I discover and questions I have here. Hopefully other people that are also trying to learn Flex will find them helpful.